it looked really easy — homemade sunflower butter

That’s our garden. The big plants on the end are mammoth grey sunflowers. If all goes well, we will soon have mounds and mounds of healthy and delicious sunflower seeds to eat and enjoy. I like sunflower seeds and all, but mounds and mounds? So I was really excited when I came across a couple of recipes that called for sunflower butter. I thought, no problem, I’ll just whip some up. How hard can it be, I make my own peanut butter. Well, apparently, it’s a little harder — for me anyway. I’ll spare you all the details about what went wrong and just skip onto what I learned.

1 — Follow the recipe the first time you make something, get your feet wet and then tweak it.

2 — Use the right equipment. Most of the recipes out there tell you to use a food processor. I figured my Vitamix would work just as well. It probably would have if I had more patience. Sunbutter requires a lot of mixing time which if you are using a food processor, is fine. It doesn’t require a lot of attention. The vitamix on the other hand requires tampering. After five minutes or so, I was done.

Just so you don’t feel like reading this post was a total waste of time, here are two tutorials that I thought were really helpful — Prudent Baby and Choosing Raw. Doesn’t it look yummy?

In the end, I think I came up with something that is at least usable. You’ll know tomorrow. If it worked, I’ll have some kind of sunflower butter recipe to share. If not, it will probably be something super lame because I don’t really have any contingency plans as far as this blog goes. Stick with me though, I’m working on it.